How do I deploy/configure a plugin?

Description

Plugins are an open source repository of code bundles that are built on top of the BMC TrueSight Pulse API to provide graphing of whatever you can think of in real-time. We currently have a number of plugins for a variety of applications and services such as:

Apache Plugin

Disk Usage Plugin

HAProxy Plugin

HTTP Check Plugin

Litespeed Plugin

Memcached Plugin

MongoDB Plugin

MySQL Plugin

NGINX Plugin

Ping Check Plugin

PostgreSQL

Processes CPU Plugin

Processes Memory plugin

RabbitMQ Plugin

Redis Plugin

...and many more may be found in the product! Anyone can write their own plugins either to add to the public repository or just for their own use. Each plugin provides a new set of graphs which can be added to existing dashboards or can even include new dashboards of their own.

Plugins are easy to add to your account. Let's add one now.

Step 1 - Select the plugin

Choose Settings from the side menu then Plugins and then click Get Plugins.

You will now see a list of plugins currently in the public repository. For this walkthrough, go ahead and select the diskuse_summary plugin.

When a plugin installs, it adds the following to your account:

Additional metrics. You can view these from the Metrics tab in Settings. You can also add these metrics as graphs to existing dashboards using the Dashboard Editor from the main side menu.

Additional dashboards (optional). If a plugin adds many new metrics the author of the plugin may choose to provide one or more additional dashboards that present these new metric graphs. These new dashboards will be available from the dashboard drop down list in the upper left of your dashboard.

After clicking on install you would have seen a message stating which of the above have just been installed, click OK to continue.

Installing a plugin into your account is a one-time process. After this you must choose one or more places to put this plugin in your environment and set the configuration parameters needed by the plugin. The plugin is added to your environment using a Meter, this article assumes you've already installed a Meter, if you haven't review the "Prerequisites" at the beginning.

Step 2 - Add the plugin to your server/Meter

Go to the Meters tab in your Settings dialog and click on the server you've setup:

On the next panel you will be told that there are no plugins currently running on this server so let's pick the Plugin we just installed from the drop-down list.

Plugins can have arbitrary configurations, it just depends on the plugin author's requirements. If some configuration parameters are needed for this plugin a panel now appears where you can enter this information. For diskuse_summary, a list of device root paths is required. For this walk through let's just add a single root device by entering '/'.

That's it! Your plugin is now configured. You can return to this configuration panel at any time to change these settings as needed.

The last panel you will now see is the meter output console. This gives you a remote view of what the meter is doing. Wait a few moments now and you should see the new configuration you just saved being passed to the meter, then the meter starting up the diskuse_summary plugin.

At this point your plugin is now running and sending data back to BMC TrueSight Pulse, to confirm create a dashboard using your new metrics!